Or at least not entirely useless

Category: Configuration Manager (page 1 of 2)

Update: After doing a full-court press on this we were able to get Microsoft to address this officially. My thanks to Mary Jo Foley and Donna Ryan for help make that happen. Updating Windows 10, version 1903 using Configuration Manager or WSUS Apparently Microsoft isn’t ready to talk about this yet so I guess I […]

A couple of weeks ago I went through the history of how the cadence of Windows 10 Feature Updates has changed since Microsoft cooked up their initial cockamamie scheme. You can find that here: You’re getting SAAAAAAAC’d Last week people started asking me about various Windows 10 updates that weren’t showing up in their WSUS […]

I’m going to shake it up here and do something totally crazy. I’m going to talk about operating systems for a moment. OSD is absolutely something in my wheel-house and I certainly have my own ways of doing things. However, I don’t really talk that much about it because there’s just so many freaking people […]

As a rule, you shouldn’t need to do this but there is currently a specific use case where you will. The impact of getting it wrong is not pretty so learn from my mistakes. Then vote on UserVoice to make the whole thing just go away.

Configuration Manager’s Automatic Deployment Rules are the ‘killer app’ that makes the product one of the most powerful tools for software updates. However, with that power and flexibility comes complexity that can be daunting for the uninitiated. In this post I try to brain-dump the lessons I had to learn when coming up to speed in the hope that it might help others.

Historically it’s been considered taboo to touch WSUS when part of a Configuration Manager environment. Those times have now past and if you’re not actively maintaining WSUS on a regular basis it’s more than likely failing causing scan failures.

For reasons you may not want to share at Configuration Manager administrator parties you may find yourself managing clients that are not domain joined. Often administrators assume Configuration Manager can’t do that or is severely limited. Read on for all the gory details.

For well over a decade there’s been a social contract of sorts with Microsoft. Security patches are released on the second Tuesday of the month at 10 AM Pacific Time. They release and we start our patching processes. Well … what if they didn’t?